This weekend, the AP reported: “Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul warned the U.S. is ‘slipping into a fascist system’ dominated by government and businesses as he held a fiery rally Saturday night upstaging established Republican Party banquets a short distance away.”
A Republican debate is scheduled on CNN for Wednesday evening.
HERBERT BIX, hbix at binghamton.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews, Bix won the Pulitzer prize for his book Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. He is a professor at Birmingham University in both the history and sociology departments. While he is best known for his work on Japan, he is a scholar of international and U.S. affairs.
He said today: “Ron Paul is a libertarian and he has racist baggage, but I would never label him with the epithet of isolationist — we should we should thank him for highlighting U.S. interventionism and where it has been leading us. He’s the sole exception on the national stage, and certainly among the major presidential candidates, to advocate a peaceful foreign policy and speak out against our slipping into what I would call a militarized police state. We can easily cite legislation — under both Bush and Obama — that have been constantly building and creating extensions for this militarized police state:
“The FISA statute was passed after the Watergate scandal to deal with Richard Nixon’s illegal actions. It required judicial warrants for wire tapping on Americans. Bush not only violated this and other laws, he tore down the wall between government and big business by granting immunity to the telecom giants who facilitated this law-breaking.
“The Patriot Act spawned numerous invasions of privacy, for example, the National Security Letters, which the FBI abused to forbid anyone — including librarians — who received them from disclosing that they were disclosing information about individuals. And on ten separate occasions Congress renewed without any meaningful revision, all the powers this act transferred to the executive branch.
“The Department of Homeland Security was established and that has operated to reduce civil liberties, especially of immigrants.
“In 2006, the Military Commissions Act gave the president unconstitutional powers to detain any individual he says is an enemy combatant anywhere in the world. How different was this Congressional vote from that to grant Hitler powers and do away with the Weimar Constitution? That seems like an extreme question, but in fact there has been a century of seizure of powers by presidents.
“And just this year, you had the National Defense Authorization Act, which expanded the scope of the Military Commissions Act, so the president could indefinitely detain people who had not been covered — both U.S. citizens and non-citizens — based solely on allegation or rumor. Now we have a new operational phase of the War on Terror: assassination of U.S. citizens — last year Anwar al-Awlaki and journalist Samir Khan were assassinated. This was a milestone event, a violation of the U.S. Constitution and international law.
“Additionally, you have Obama’s administration developing the tactics of torture and drone assassination. Pentagon and CIA war crimes, such as torture and the outsourcing of torture, contribute greatly to the moral degradation of American society.
“Obama has also gone further that Bush in the silencing of whistle blowers. And the courts have actually abetted the executive branch’s subversion of the Constitution because they have refused to question the executive’s claim of ‘national security’ to justify it all.
“As the power of the executive branch grows, it demands obedience through unconstitutional laws and extensions, and the whole ensemble of policies, laws and their extensions threaten freedom, constitutionalism and international law. Only Ron Paul has had the guts to put it on the national agenda.”
